This could be very good for Meta, just get the government to never exercise the law on you and to do it instead on smaller competitors that may threaten you.<p>Now everyone wanting to make a communications app (or anything implementing that functionality) is risking an expensive lawsuit on the UK. Meta too, but they have the bucks and influence to weather it.
Rarely a fan...but I've got to say hell yeah FB!<p>Not because FB as platform in particular but because I appreciate someone with weight telling the UK law makers that their insane ideas are insane.<p>Just the fact that there is a different position suggests that there is a question to be answered and thought about. Get everyone stop and think.
It's intriguing which battles they choose.<p>It wasn't long since there was a discussion where some people were arguing that they can't make moral judgements because disobeying the law would put them in a very difficult situation:<p><a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35028107&" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35028107&</a>
“If the company refused to do, it could face fines of up to 4% of its parent company Meta’s annual turnover – unless it pulled out of the UK market entirely.”<p>Wow. I wonder if it got to that point if Meta would change course and disable end to end encryption for UK users and people messaging UK users, if that would be sufficient to comply. If this lobbying causes the UK to change course, I wonder what impact that would have on other countries’ attempts to weaken encryption, if any other such attempts are happening.
I was wondering why can't chat apps be like email apps: i.e., let users point to a private key on their own phone, and publish their public key. Then, just like exchanging secure emails, people transparently chat using the same encrypt-decrypt mechanism? Won't this work?
If E2EE in messaging becomes table stakes and Meta can find a way to inject ads subtly enough not to piss off users into quitting, Meta wins hard since they've been building their AI infra to "get around" Apple's tracking restrictions for a while now and there are reports that it is finally showing good results. They'll be able to dial in their ads way better than any competitors until they catch up in the AI department.<p><a href="https://www.ft.com/content/fc95a0f7-5e4e-4616-9b17-7b72daee6c60" rel="nofollow">https://www.ft.com/content/fc95a0f7-5e4e-4616-9b17-7b72daee6...</a>
Isn't this a red herrring? I thought the law didn't require the removal of E2E encryption, but rather mandated the addition of a back door that submits some kind of meta data summary to a third party service?
Dark patterns trick WhatsApp users to enable backups to Google and Apple. If you have them disabled odds are good the other side got tricked into them. Even if your backups are encrypted, it's using only a 64bit key. That means Five Eyes have near real-time access to your "encrypted" messages. Hell, I have to decline backups every time I use WhatsApp on my iPhone, yet after a phone reset all my messages were still there. They were gone in Signal for example. Is UK making a stink about it to lure bad people into a false sense of security? We all know why large US tech companies bought Skype (twice) back in the day. It's naive to think WhatsApp was bought for a different purpose.
Is the E2EE used by WhatsApp actually E2E? Or is it the "encrypted between you and our servers, and our servers and your friend"?<p>Anyone know?
Instead of removing end-to-end encryption, there may be alternative solutions to address law enforcement concerns. For example, law enforcement agencies could work with WhatsApp to develop lawful access mechanisms that allow them to access messages in specific cases where they have a legitimate need to do so. These mechanisms could be subject to strict oversight and transparency to prevent abuse.
Call me sceptic, but does not whatsapp see what you are typing when you are creating messages?
They need to log the keydown event somehow, right?<p>And the predictive text spits out what it thinks you want to type.<p>And backups are possible even if you never had one before.<p>This is so very dodgy to me.<p>Maybe its e2e from the moment you submit until it arrives at the desired destination.<p>Which brings me to the next issue, they need to parse the text to display and when you quote a text, does it just blindly quote a blurb?<p>I do not believe in conspiracies and such, but there are so many double speech possibilities here...